Best in Fiction
Laurus → Eugene Vodolazkin
Honorable Mentions
The People in the Trees → Hana Yanagihara
A Canticle For Leibowitz → Walter Miller
Best in Nonfiction
Tending the Wild → Kat Anderson
Honorable Mentions
A Hut at the End of the Village → John Moriarty
Smokehole and Courting the Wild Twin → Martin Shaw
Sand Talk → Tyson Yunkaporta
I've loved books for as long as I can remember. Reading is possibly the only passion that has survived the many metamorphoses of my identity, and I'm confident it will last as long as I live. For better or worse, subconsciously I've always regarded the written word as the pinnacle of communication. And in an ironic twist of events, the threads I've followed across printed pages this year has led me to doubt its supremacy.
Or at least to consider other mediums. I have John Moriarty, Martin Shaw, and Tyson Yunkaporta to thank for that. Over the course of 2021 (especially recently) I discovered the power and value of mythology in forming an understanding of the world, and the importance of the oral tradition within it. And the baffling thing is that storytellers exist who manage to translate the presence and dynamism of the spoken word onto the page. John Moriarty's work in particular is unlike anything I've read before. Reading the Irish philosopher/mystic is like peering through the dimness at a wild haired man circling a campfire, like the skalds and griots of old whose compositions changed with every repetition. Frankly, I don't understand at least half of everything he says, but it affects me deeply, and I think one day I'll figure out why.
Each year around this time I go back through the list of books I read and choose my favorites. Turns out my top novel for the year was also the last.
Laurus is extraordinary, and truly unique. Written by the Russian medievalist Eugene Vodolazkin, it feels distinctly Russian (Lisa Hayden's translation is magnificent). It has that Dosteyevskian flavor of a slow moving glacier, not terribly gripping or hard to put down but leaves you awestruck by the time it's done. It tells the story of the peasant Arseny, raised by his herbalist grandfather in plague stricken 15th century Rus, who does something terrible in his teenage years and spends the rest of his life trying to atone for it. He travels the continent healing the sick, becomes a holy fool for awhile, and eventually travels to Jerusalem with an Italian obsessed with finding the precise date of the end of the world (he also has visions of the future, which frequently consists of 20th century Russians doing mundane things).
The book is effectively a fictional hagiography — the biography of a saint. But while stories of heroic figures tend to emphasize only their extrahuman feats, Arseny's faults and internal anguish are constantly apparent. Over the course of the book you are forced to consider the nature of time and memory, of what connects an old man to the boy he was in his youth, the danger of crowds and the hive-mind, and of course free will.
It's also hilarious. There's a generous helping of Garcia Marquez-esque magical realism and absurdity, where holy fools throw stones at demons, divide up a town like drug dealers, and beat each other for infringing on their turf. There's a scene where one holy fool chases another across a river:
Arseny and the Zachelichye residents silently observed the holy fools walking, one after the other. They bounced lightly on the waves, ludicrously waving their arms to maintain their balance.
Apparently they can only walk on water, said the residents. They have not yet learned to run.
Vodolazkin switches his delivery frequently, ranging from archaic Old English sounding speech to occasionally having crowds collectively speak like millenials:
Well, like, you know, said the concerned Zavelichye residents. Beating might not always be so bad, but killing, is that really piousness? It is a mortal, if it can be put that way, sin.
It's absolutely a book I will read again at some point.
My top spot for nonfiction usually goes to a book that shifted how I think about something, or opened my eyes to a world I knew little about. Tending the Wild fits the bill there. Kat Anderson carves a path through the history of European interaction with California natives, indigenous land management practices throughout the state, and their modern relevance to managing the landscape today.
We tend to think of non-agricultural societies as homogenous. Another fantastic book I'm currently midway through, The Dawn of Everything, spends a long time harping on this — the assumption that before farming, humans either fell into the Hobbesian bucket, scrounging and scraping in the dirt for a meager, violent existence, or that of Rousseau, living in simple egalitarian bands where nothing all that interesting ever happened. The reality is as nuanced and varied as humans typically are.
A key aspect of this is that the line between the hunter gatherer and the agriculturalist is not all that distinct, nor is there a clear trajectory from hunting and gathering to farming. The California natives blurred these borders especially well. While heavily managed and tailored for food production, for centuries Europeans in California saw it as virgin wilderness because it didn't look like the farming to which they were accustomed. John Muir exemplified this blindness, rhapsodizing on the wonder of the "untouched landscape" while simultaneously being troubled by the oddness of feeling "food poor in so rich a landscape". Meanwhile the indigenous were transplanting, pruning, burning, coppicing, saving seed, and modifying habitats while utilizing over 1000 plant species for food.
Muir's view of California nature was a necessary counterweight to the view that had prevailed before — that nature was there to be used, exploited, and commodified — but it left us with a schizophrenic approach to the natural world: humans either conquer nature and destroy its integrity, or they visit it as an outsider, idealizing its beauty and leaving it largely alone... Both positions treat nature as an abstraction — separate from humans and not understood, not real.
As someone who has long maligned the stain of modernity that permeates much of California, more than anything the book clobbered me with the awareness of its former abundance and diversity. And while we've managed to bulldoze nearly every ecosystem within the state, it's not entirely lost. The ecological history of the land matters if we are to continue living here, and indigenous practices, far from being static history, must be a key part of the way forward.
The Full List, 2021
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Title | Author |
+====================================+=====================+
| Pilgrim at Tinker Creek | Annie Dillard |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| When Technologies Fail | Matthew Stein |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The Hand-Sculpted House | Ianto Evans |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Lo-TEK | Julia Watson |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Holistic Goat Care | Gianclis Caldwell |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Last Bus to Wisdom | Ivan Doig |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Oneness vs the One Percent | Vandana Shiva |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Integrated Forest Gardening | Wayne Weisman |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The New Organic Grower | Eliot Coleman |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Freedom or Death | Nikos Kazantzakis |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Organic Mushroom Cultivation... | Tradd Cotter |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The Tao of Vegetable Gardening | Carol Deppe |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Who Fears Death | Nnedi Okorafor |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The Anarchist's Toolchest | Christopher Shwartz |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Tending the Wild | M. Kat Anderson |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Train Dreams | Denis Johnson |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Gardening When it Counts | Steve Solomon |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The Largesse of the Sea Maiden | Denis Johnson |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The People in the Trees | Hana Yanagihara |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The Trapper's Last Shot | John Yount |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Roundwood Timber Framing | Ben Law |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Make Mead Like a Viking | Jereme Zimmerman |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Water, Wood, and Wild Things | Hannah Kirshner |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Ancient Brews | Patrick McGovern |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The No-Till Organic Vegetable Farm | Daniel Mays |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The Man in the High Castle | Philip Dick |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Restoration Agriculture | Mark Shephard |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Hunt Gather Parent | Michaeleen Doucleff |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Lesser Beasts | Mark Essig |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Material | Nick Kary |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The Blade Itself | Joe Abercrombie |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Before They Were Hung | Joe Abercrombie |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Last Argument of Kings | Joe Abercrombie |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Eager | Ben Goldfarb |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The Design of Straw Bale Buildings | Bruce King |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| A Short History of Progress | Ronald Wright |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The Husband Coached Childbirth | Robert Bradley |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Best Served Cold | Joe Abercrombie |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Still Life With Woodpecker | Tom Robbins |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| This is Your Mind on Plants | Michael Pollan |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Courting the Wild Twin | Martin Shaw |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Smokehole | Martin Shaw |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Fermentation as Metaphor | Sandor Katz |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Entangled Life | Merlin Sheldrake |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Eat Sleep Poop | Scott Cohen |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The Myths We Live By | Mary Midgley |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Waiting for the Barbarians | JM Coetzee |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Pincher Martin | William Golding |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The Heroes | Joe Abercrombie |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Earthbag Building | Kaki Hunter |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Red Country | Joe Abercrombie |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The Wine Grower's Handbook | Jeff Cox |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| A Branch From the Lightning Tree | Martin Shaw |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Sand Talk | Tyson Yunkaporta |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| A Canticle For Leibowitz | Walter Miller |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Hyperreality | Frank Mulder |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| A Hut at the End of the Village | John Moriarty |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Laurus | Eugene Vodolazkin |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+
| The Dawn of Everything | David Graeber |
+------------------------------------+---------------------+